I looked around the workshop and noticed I have boxes of left over optics that didn't work out in various projects over the years, including some nice big achromats I grabbed from Anchor and Surplus Shed a good ten years ago.

And then, later in the day, all the empty shipping tubes from McMaster in the garage caught my eye...
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Remember when I said since Denton's turned two, no more bath pics? I lied. bathtime is just too much fun.

Denton's favorite recent bath toy has been, of all crazy things, a handful of icecubes at a time. Since we often play with food coloring in the bath anyway, it's not a stretch to imagine colored ice cubes!

I was a bit surprised that feezing food coloring causes it to lose most of its color. Quite a few ice cubes had gone almost completely clear.

Camilla: Here's an denoised version of the pic you posted of Denton in the new shorts you made him. The noise was particularly bad so the filter's very noticable, but I think it's still an improvement:

[Camilla took this pic.] Denton accidentally tripped on the dog's leash and went face-first down a couple of the concrete stairs at Tufts. And yet the look on his face somehow suggests that he attacked the Earth itself... and won. Little boys.

[Clearing out a few pics from the last month or so that I hadn't gotten around to posting...]

Denton requested a handful of raisins while he was in the bath. The next time I looked over, he'd carefully lined them up along the edege of the sink and over the next ten minutes, ate them one by one, left to right.

Denton's well aware that the mouse moves a pointer on the screen and when you click on things in a web browser, you might get flash slideshows of birds, or jaguars or puppies. But not on 64 bit linux, because the flash plugin doesn't work. This doesn't stop him from trying to hack a fix.

Denton turned two on the seventh, unfortunately he's been sick since and tonight's been especially rough. I just got to uploading some of the pics off the camera, but just getting this one ready to post has been two hours of interruptions, running upstairs to comfort him every ten minutes or so. Poor little guy. Camilla's taking a turn with him, so I finally got time to finish the post.

Also.... hooray for noise reduction algorithms that work:

The original before running it through the little denoise plugin I've written for Gimp. Almost makes ISO 1600 useful :-)

Spock: "Captain, we seem to have entered an uncharted region of lime jello."

Kirk: "Iz Okay Spock! We can eats it!"

(I had to get these out of the way-- Denton turns two today, so he's probably officially too old for any new emabarrassing bathtub photos we can use to mortify him in front of his first date. The green is just food coloring. It's one of his bathtime play rituals at this point, he begs for a specific color almost every night.)

(Denton really does do this. He'll be going all Power Rangers on the poor dog and she'll be sitting there taking it, when he notices we're watching and suddenly starts petting her sweetly and smiling. Yeah kid, you're going to make a great politician.)

(Aside the second: Despite the mailing label affixed to the child, he isn't going anywhere. That's another story.)